death in vegas

Death in Vegas: Seduction, Kitsch, and Sacrifice
(excerpts from Stephen Linstead)

"Doesn’t Las Vegas offer the state-of-the-art in hedonism? The last word in every pleasure you can think of? With death just around the corner, down the alley, the drying-out clinic, the desert beyond…. Is it the fascination of the risk of death that makes Las Vegas so sexy?"

" anguish, which lays us open to annihilation and death, is always linked to eroticism; our sexual activity finally rivets us to the distressing image of death, and the knowledge of death deepens the abyss of eroticism. The curse of decay constantly recoils on sexuality, which it tends to eroticize: in sexual anguish there is a sadness of death, an apprehension of death which.. we will never be able to shake off" Georges Bataille The Accursed Share Vol 11 : 84.Just in case you thought there was no distinction between representation and reality, there is death. Just in case you thought experience and the representation of experience melted into one another, death provides a structural principle separating the two. See the difference, death asks, see the way language and vision differ from the actual, the irrevocable, the real?"

Regina Barreca "Writing as Voodoo" p 174.

http://www.dmsp.dauphine.fr/management/PapersMgmt/43Linstead.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7oMqpjIYLk